The much-awaited conference - All About Music 2018 is here

Tarsame Mittal, Founder, TM Talent Management and his team have been moving city-to-city to gauge the underlying issues in the music industry and also learn what the participants would like the 85+ speakers to discuss during their panels. Yesterday was the Delhi Chapter for this exercise and it was absolutely enlightening! There is definitely an uproar in excitement for the upcoming conference in Mumbai on 23-24th August. This chapter comprised of Blaise Fernandes, Atul Churamani, Devraj Sanyal, Gurpreet Singh, Rabindra Narayan, Ankur Mehra, Bunty Bhains and Dilin Nair. Tarsame Mittal moderated the panel and introduced us to Mr. Blaise Fernandes who spoke about the workings of IMI (Indian Music Industry) and growth in the music industry in the past two years stating that there has been a 27% growth in revenue in 2016 and 2017 with over 850 crores earned last year. Streaming contributing with 665 crores, Synchronisation at 50 crores and Public Performance royalties at 75 crores. India is currently ranked at 19 amongst other music industries and cited the example of China who rose from it's 25th rank to the 9th largest music industry by carrying out strict reforms in the collection of revenues from music. He urged us to prepare ourselves for a subscription model which would benefit everyone in the music industry, including the consumers. We moved on to Atul Churamani who explained to us the importance of copyright and publishing and broke down the meaning of copyright and the rights an artist gains from copyrighting their work - be lyrics, composition or the sound recording. He emphasized the importance of understanding contracts and being careful of assigning our copyrights or licensing our copyrights to a label/individual. From there Devraj Sanyal took over to explain the importance of record labels in today's age and explained the effort made by the label's team and it's resources used to market an artist to every nook and corner. He spoke about the kind of music and artist looks for and also pointed towards the uprise in Independent/Non-Film music in India. Dilin Nair aka Raftaar also chimed and said that it is not always important to sign with a label and there are ways to attain commercial success as long as one is capable/driven enough to put in the hard work required to gain success. Ankur Mehra followed him and mentioned how Facebook is making efforts to empower the musicians of India and spoke about the upcoming Facebook products that will help in doing so including the introduction of verified Facebook pages to India that will now available to pages in the settings option and also Lip-sync. Gurpreet Singh spoke about the importance of creating good content and how One Digital Entertainment works on empowering content creators. He also emphasized the importance of YouTube and how one can gain money from the platform by having at least 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of content. Towards the end, Mr. Rabindra Narayan and Bunty Bhains spoke about the ever-growing Punjabi Music Industry and what PTC Network and Bunty Bhains Production is doing to empower the artists from Punjab, especially the unpolished gems they are finding in the villages of Punjab. The panel was eye-opening for many who were present there and definitely gave us a sneak peek into the discussions taking place at the All About Music 2018 conference in Mumbai on 23-24th August.